“Propaganda could
make believers out of doubters. Propaganda, only propaganda is necessary.

There is no end of stupid people.”

Adolph Hitler

“Think
of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

Joseph
Goebbels, Nazi Germany Propaganda Minister

Within a year of
Hitler and his Nazi Party assuming power in Germany, control of all forms of
communication (newspapers, magazines, public meetings, movies and radio)
occurred. The Nazi Party, under the direction
of Hitler and his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, determined what
information Germans were exposed to, and most of that information involved
obfuscation of the truth and outright lies. Misinformation permeated all aspects of
communication in Germany including information about the crowd sizes of Hitler
rallies.

Hitler considered
himself a demigod, and there are many things demigods fear. At the top of the list is when the masses
start seeing them as just another ordinary leader. Hence, the common practice
of convincing the public that crowd sizes are “huge” at rallies and other
public ceremonies. Goebbels was very
adept at putting out that misinformation.

Last Saturday was President Trump’s first full day in office, and I
thought about the Hitler quote as I listened to our new president give a speech
to CIA agents, a speech in which he insisted that a million to a million and a
half people attended his inauguration.
You might be wondering “what the hell Trump was doing talking about his
inauguration crowd size at the CIA.”
Well, that’s what narcissistic demigods do!

Later in the day, I thought about the
Goebbels quote as I watched the new White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer,
give his 5-minute diatribe to the press corps.
During those few minutes, Spicer excoriated the press for putting out
inaccurate statistics about the number of people who had attended the
inauguration. According to Spicer,
“Trump’s swearing-in-ceremony had the largest audience to ever witness an
inauguration.” And this morning, I
thought about both quotes as I listened to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s senior
aide, on This Week with George Stephanopoulus back up Spicer’s lies when she
argued that Spicer had not lied but had presented “alternative facts” about the
size of the inauguration crowd.

The German people
of the 1930s had no access to alternate information that countered the Nazi
lies. There were no cell phone cameras,
no TV cameras, no helicopter photos, no satellite imagery. Today, of course, it is different. We live in a technological age that provides
us with all that and more. The National
Park Service does not put out estimates of crowd sizes for presidential
inaugurations, but visual photographs comparing President Obama’s 2009
Inauguration attendance (estimated at 1.8 million people) with President
Trump’s showed Friday’s Inauguration was far smaller. These photos were refuted by Spicer and
Conway. I guess they think all 300
million plus Americans are blind! During
the election season, Trump was prone to spewing misinformation and lies. Now as president, he has his propaganda
people in place, and that will make it more difficult for Americans to
distinguish fact from fiction.

In Nazi Germany
the government was the media. Fortunately, that is not the case in the
United States given our First Amendment.
Consequently, the Trump propaganda team is hell-bent on discrediting the
media any way it can. Americans should
get ready for a continued barrage of misinformation and lies. Black
will be turned into white. Up will
become down. Left will be right. That is, of course, unless our media has the
skill, the intestinal fortitude and the perseverance to take a stance against the
Trump Administration’s propaganda. The
media must engage in its own barrage of truth and balanced perspectives. Even that won’t be enough if the American
people buy into the Trump Administration’s lies. Our 230-year-old democracy rests upon our desire
to care about the truth.

PS: To get a clearer
picture of what the future might look like if we fail to value truth, I suggest
we all reread George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”